Humanism - Research Article from Encyclopedia of Sociology

The Enlightenment and the Legacy of Sociological Humanism

Although the Enlightenment philosophes initiated the enterprise of modern sociology through their call for the application of scientific principles to the study of human behavior (Rossides 1998), humanist sociologists stress that the philosophes were first and foremost moral philosophers. Science and morality were to be fused, not separated; the "is" and the "ought" were to be merged into a moral science, a science for the betterment of humankind. It was Jean Jacques Rousseau, with his arguments against inequality and for the dignity of the person, who best represents this tradition of moral science tradition Rousseau (1755–1985) started with the fundamental assumption that all people are created equal and from this formulated a radical system of politics. Rousseau and the philosophes were wedded to the idea that individual liberty and freedom prospered only under conditions of minimal external constraint that had to be...